We are industrial for other reasons, and in a different way. Our working instincts are very few; our faith in them still more feeble; and our physical wants far greater than those of any other creature. Indeed, the one half of the Industrial Arts are the result of our being born without clothes; the other half,of our being born without tools.
I do not propose to offer you a catalogue of the arts which our unclothedness compels us to foster. The shivering savage in the colder countries robs the seal and the bear, the buffalo and the deer, of the one mantle which Nature has given them. The wild huntsman, by a swift but simple transmutation, becomes the clothier, the tailor, the tanner, the currier, the leather-dresser, the glover, the saddler, the shoemaker, the tent-maker. And the tent-maker, the arch-architect of one of the great schools of architecture, becomes quickly a house-builder, building with snow where better material is not to be had; and a ship-builder, constructing, out of a few wooden ribs and stretched animal skins, canoes which, as sad experience has shown, may survive where English ships of oak have gone to destruction.